Why no calls for an independent "Shiastan" / "Islamic Republic Of Iraq"?

[Martin_Hyde]

@tagos

I’ve just read that article. I liked the bit where he got to talk with soldiers from one of the groups the USA was arming to fight the group that held him and they said ‘well, yea, we lied to the Americans’.

My take out from the whole thing was that there aren’t any good guys. They are all lunatic fanatics with extremely fluid and biddable loyalties and you can’t push a playing card between ISIS and any of the rest of them in terms of craziness and west hating. It’s insanity to believe that arming one faction to fight another isn’t doing anything more than arming our enemies and that includes the so-called Free Syrian Army.

The enemy of my enemy is a once and future enemy in this mess.

Yeah, I was never in favor of our involvement in Syria (I remain very against Obama threatening to do something in response to a chemical weapons attack and then not) because I didn’t feel (like McCain and Saudi Arabia advocated) we could meaningfully arm and support just the “moderate” rebels and we wouldn’t just be causing more headache for ourselves. That article made it seem like it’s way worse than even I thought, early in that guy’s captivity he escaped and made it to the Free Syrian Army which we’ve helped train, arm, and have basically supported as secularists or at least not crazed jihadists. They turned the guy right back over to Al-Nusra, primarily because they knew there was going to be a financial reward to doing so. The FSA may or may not actively hate all Americans like the Al-Nusra guys, but they have no problem with Al-Nusra and as has been shown cavort with them pretty closely.

It’s interesting that even the Al-Nusra guys know there is no ideological justification to their fighting Islamic State, so that’s pretty obviously just a straight up turf war between IS/AQ over what amounts to money/resources and nothing else (and I’m pretty sure on both sides their brand of Islam would condemn/forbid fighting/killing Muslims with the exact same beliefs solely over a resource dispute.)

It’s also interesting that while Islamic State had said any Al-Nusra fighters were subject to immediate execution no matter what if captured and they would never be accepted with open arms. But, if you just go into an Islamic State recruitment center and take an oath renouncing Al-Nusra, that’s actually forgotten and you’re just allowed to join Islamic State (and get a significant pay raise and better equipment than you were getting from Al-Nusra.)

It kind of confirmed for me what I’ve suspected for a really long time because it’s something that goes back as old as ideological warfare (think the 30 Years War), while there is a sliver of the people in various groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Hamas etc that are true believer jihadists (it’s hard to argue the suicide bombers aren’t), I think most of them are motivated almost entirely by earthly concerns.

The Al-Nusra leader the journalist spoke with some was never willing to just admit he was fighting Islamic State over oil, so that shows he’s playing a brand of politics in which the ideological justification needs to be maintained but pretty obviously the guy didn’t have the kind of strong ideological convictions you might expect from a high ranking Al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda leader. Instead he was more of a mafioso upset he was losing turf to a much stronger gang, and when the journalist was finally freed all the ideological nonsense the leader was spouting about his captivity was shown to be untrue…he was released due to Qatar and most likely that means Qatar gave Al-Nusra front some money to appease the United States. I think that’s actually how a lot of our captives have been brought home when captured by Qatari funded groups. Unfortunately for the captives of Islamic State I don’t think they have a funding relationship with any one country where we can exert that kind of pressure, and since we aren’t willing to pay ransoms directly those guys get their head chopped off.

[Steken]

@Martin_Hyde

Due to their stupidity they don’t realize the oil fields they covet will be very difficult to hold if you let the local population get impressed into a barbarian horde, but that’s typical of the short-sighted thinking throughout governments everywhere (not just the near East.)

To be fair to the Shi’ites, most of Iraq’s major oil fields (Basra, Amarah, Qurna, Rumalia, etc.) are in firmly Shi’ite territory, and are at no risk of being overrun by ISIS. Pulling out of Anbar was a sign of weakness, not a sign of stupidity. However, alienating the Sunnis in the first place was either extremely fucking stupid, or perhaps a cynical, ugly, fiercely immoral bit of ice-cold Realpolitik, based on the idea that getting, for example, a “clean” all-Shi’ite Baghdad, cleansed of its Sunnis, was worth the hatred and the resentment of the country’s Sunnis.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s highest-ranking Shi’ite authority - Ayatollah Sistani - now calls for the arming of Anbar’s anti-ISIS Sunnis. He is also trying to put an end to anti-Sunni massacres carried out by Shi’ite militias. Through a representative, he scolded 'em like so:

“You must protect the lives of innocent Iraqi citizens and safeguard their souls and their property, whatever their religious affiliation [italics added]. They have been given to you for safekeeping, so make them feel secure. […] Beware, beware, lest any hand be raised against them or their property, or lest anyone among them come to harm; that is a mortal sin.”

[robert_columbia]

@Martin_Hyde

It’s less developed than those countries. Plenty of European countries that contained disparate ethnic and religious groups fought pretty regularly and were what we’d call “shit holes” in relatively recent history (say in the past 500 years.) Iraq and most of the near east have been sprinkled with some modern technology but little of the education and overall cultural and societal development that accompanied it in the West…In Iraq Shi’ites and Sunni have simply never bought into the concept of a secular government where multiple religious factions can coexist peacefully. The Shi’ites have mostly used their power in a democratic government (due to being the majority) to oppress the Sunni minority…

Good points, and it’s worth mentioning that the US largely became what it was because of so many people fleeing the violence of Europe. It used to be that Protestants and Catholics were fighting bitterly over control of the English throne and being of the “wrong” faith at the wrong time could earn you a free trip to the gallows. Germany’s bitter unification struggles of the 1700’s and 1800’s similarly led to a lot of people, including some of my ancestors, to say screw this, let’s find a better place to live. So many of them moved here that they set up entire German speaking towns that continued to speak the language for generations. Even today, the German-American/Pennsylvania Dutch community is very strongly pro-freedom of religion and pro-separation of church and state. They know what happens when you mix them…and they know it isn’t pretty.

Since America had so many people who had seen or recognized what sectarian violence can do to a country, and also were, or were descended from, people who had come there to seek freedom from such violence, it seemed natural to set up a secular government that could survive without having to kowtow to the faction of the day.